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Essex Museum Development is offering grants of up to £500 to support the delivery of learning and community engagement using collections.

The grants aim to support local museums to:

Develop relationships with local education providers including schools, colleges and home education groups

Develop new learning and engagement resources

Develop an adult learning offer

Deliver activities which will reach new audiences

Make their venue more accessible for disabled audiences

The funding scheme is open to any Accredited museum (or museum registered as Working Towards Accreditation) within the Essex or Southend-on-Sea local authority boundaries. Please note that to apply you must have attended at least two of the following training days:

It is important to read the guidance document before applying. It contains some suggestions as to what the grant can be used for, but this is not an exhaustive list. Please do get in contact if you wish to discuss your ideas.

It’s really easy to think of social media as something you do to tell everyone about your museum. Social media is also a way for people to talk to you, tell you what they’re interested in, ask questions about your museum or the work you do.

The fact that it can be a two way conversation way makes social media very different from traditional PR and it’s a much more approachable way to reach out to potential visitors. Through social media, your visitors are much more likely to see you and other volunteers / staff as people like them. Listening to what other people say or post is an important as what you say or post.

What does community mean to you?

Why do you work at the museum? Do you volunteer your time or you work at the museum because you’re interested in the history of the objects, people and organisations your museum is working hard to preserve and share? Are you interested in the local area and the local people and maybe you like seeing children enjoy the museum? What other things motivate you?

Answering these questions about you and your colleagues can help you figure out who / what is part of the community of your museum. And these are people and organisations who may want to talk to you on social media. Some examples:

Staff & volunteers

Visitors or supporters you

Charitable organisations your museum or colleagues support

Local schools

Organisations or local businesses whose work & stories your museum documents or links to

People or organisations who’ve donated to your museum, sponsored events or added to its collection

They’re all part of your community and you can use social media to follow as many of them as you can find on there. Once you have your own social media channel set up (it could be Facebook, Twitter, Instagram – it doesn’t matter which):

Write down a list of people & organisations for your museum by using the list above

Look to see if they use social media and follow them if they do. If they don’t you can try to find a website for any organisations.

‘Like’ any social media posts they make that you think are interesting, especially if it has an obvious relevance to your museum

Re-share interesting posts from those you followed (this is retweeting their posts on Twitter or Sharing their posts on Facebook)

Post positive replies on their posts (e.g. “We love your photos” or “Good luck to everyone involved in the event”)

Take photographs if you visit another interesting organisation and share on your social media account with, tagging it with their social media name.

Share the link to blog posts written by other organisations or people , if you think they’re interesting or relevant to your museum.

Why should I spend time talking about what someone else is doing?

The great thing is while you’re talking about someone else who is important in your community you’re also promoting your museum. Because social media is public potential visitors (and many other people) will see you talking about other organisations they like. They may never have heard of your museum before and you may not know they’re out there, but this will give them a reason to notice you and maybe come into your museum.

Those you talk to and promote on social media are also more likely to follow your social media and then share your posts, so your posts will then be seen by more people. It works in the same way you make friends: if people realise that you and they have something in common, they’ll take more of an interest in what you do and what you’re interested in.

And so your social media community begins to grow … and grow … and soon it will take over the world. Mwuahahahahaha! Ah, sorry, I mean it will help you find more visitors and help more people appreciate the excellent and hard work that goes into running your museum 😉 Almost as good as taking over the world, isn’t it?

Do you have any suggestions on how to be a part of the local community using social media? We’d love to hear them and they may be really helpful to other museums so please share them in the comments below.

Essex Museum Development is offering grants of up to £500 to support the delivery of learning and community engagement using collections.

The grants aim to support local museums to:

Develop relationships with local education providers including schools, colleges and home education groups

Develop new learning and engagement resources

Develop an adult learning offer

Deliver activities which will reach new audiences

Make their venue more accessible for disabled audiences

The funding scheme is open to any Accredited museum (or museum registered as Working Towards Accreditation) within the Essex or Southend-on-Sea local authority boundaries.

It is important to read the guidance document before applying. It contains some suggestions as to what the grant can be used for, but this is not an exhaustive list. Please do get in contact if you wish to discuss your ideas.

Malcolm Burgess is leading on an interesting new project and is looking for museums to get involved:

Are you involved with an Essex museum, gallery or anything similar?

We’re the project managers for the new Arts Council England creative writing project Essex Belongs To Us starting soon. Our aim is to involve as many people as possible in writing about Essex in as creative a way as possible, with our own workshops in Essex, Southend and Thurrock libraries and a published book at the end of it, with a performance at the Essex Book Festival.

The project will run from April 2016 – March 2017.

We’re keen to know if you’ll be running museum or gallery workshops of any kind of your own for writers involving some kind of interaction with your collection, exhibits, resources or whatever.

If you are, we’d love to include full details on our website and to encourage as many writers as possible to attend. It will be an ideal way to promote your workshops further – and to help new writing from Essex.

Sarah-Joy Maddeaux, You Are Hear Project Officer at the Essex Record Office, talks about the sounds of our county:

For the past six months, the You Are Hear project team at the Essex Sound and Video Archive has been asking the public what Essex sounds like. Whether stopping innocent passers-by in shopping centres, appealing to the public through newspapers, or calling for suggestions through e-bulletins, we have been asking you what noises you hear in your daily routine; what noises you associate with the county; what sounds represent your community.

Now we have the answer! Well, to a point. We have compiled the results with our sound recordist, Stuart Bowditch. Based on your suggestions, he has been venturing into the far corners of the county, braving all weathers, to capture those soundscapes. And now you can hear some of the results on our audio map, Essex Sounds.

From church bells to firework displays; the sounding of ship’s horns at Tilbury to bring in the New Year to the annual New Year’s hunt parade through Maldon (yes, he managed to capture both, and more besides that day!): see if your suggestion of an Essex sound has been recorded.

In our public surveys about Essex sounds, many people commented on a perceived difference between the north and south of the county. Commonly, people considered the southern part of the county to contain more industrial noises, more hustle and bustle, more crowded atmospheres: with more people speaking with a London or ‘TOWIE accent’. The north was depicted as quieter, more rural, where the people are more likely to speak with a ‘traditional’ Essex accent.

Is this an accurate depiction of the county, or is it over-generalised? Why not consult the Essex Sounds map to see if it reflects this north-south divide?

The map also enables comparisons between old and new sounds of the county. We have uploaded some historic recordings from the Archive. For example, you can listen to an auction at the Chelmsford cattle market in the 1950s.

You can then compare it with a recording made on that site in 2015, capturing the busy atmosphere of High Chelmer on a Saturday. Try it out here

If your sound suggestion has not yet been added, do not fear: our site is still a work in progress. Stuart will continue to record Essex sounds over the next few months, gradually uploading them to the audio map. We will also keep adding historic recordings as they are digitised, as part of this Heritage Lottery Funded project. We are happy to receive further suggestions of places and events to record, though we will not be able to include everything within the scope of the project.

In the next phase, our web developers will build an app version. By the autumn, you will be able to take the map on location, listening to the clips in the very spot where they were first recorded.

In the meantime, why not contribute your own recording to the site? We want the map to fully reflect your experiences of what Essex sounds like. You will find instructions on the ‘contribute’ page, but please get in touch if you have any questions.

We would be delighted to talk to any museums that want to use the Essex Sounds map for engagement activities. Maybe you want to host a recording day, encouraging people to venture out into the surrounding area with their phones and tablets to capture what your community sounds like in 2016, then upload the fruits to the map. Or perhaps a workshop is more up your street: inviting theorists and practitioners to review the material and discuss how the sounds of Essex are changing, and what this means about bigger socio-cultural shifts. How does sound affect our sense of place? What sounds are absent in our collections, and how can we redress that for future generations?

We would love to hear any feedback you have, so that we can continue to improve the site and pass on your comments to our website developers, Community Sites. Please be gentle with us, though: we are still in the development phase! We would also be grateful for any volunteers to test the map more extensively, particularly if you are using accessibility software. Please get in touch find out more.

For more information about the You Are Hear project, you can visit the project site. You can also listen to more recordings on our Soundcloud channel.

From summer 2016 to summer 2018, we will be showcasing a selection of our recordings on interactive touchscreen kiosks and listening benches that will tour public locations across the county. We are also looking for volunteers to help us with installing listening benches in the following areas:

Burnham-on-Crouch

Chelmsford

Clacton-on-Sea

Coggeshall

Epping

Great Baddow

Great Chesterford / Clavering

Southend-on-Sea

Witham

Please get in touch if you want to be a part of our tour, or if you can help with the community benches.

In 2015, a pilot project ran across Bedfordshire, Essex and Hertfordshire. The evaluation of the pilot project has led to some revisions of the original project, which is being run for a second year and expanded to be open to more museums, and to run for a longer period of time. The project has also been simplified and will be accompanied by more direct marketing to provide additional support to participating museums.

The project is open to all museums across Hertfordshire, Essex and Bedfordshire who will be offering activities for children during the 2016 May half term and / or summer holidays. There is a fee of £50 to participate in the 2016 project, which will go towards supporting the cost of the project.

Children will be given a Passport and a series (approx. 6) of simple challenges to complete during the summer holidays; e.g. ‘visit a museum you have not been to before’ ‘take part in a workshop involving clay’ Challenges will be open enough to allow children to have a good choice of museums to visit in order to achieve all of them. Each museum listing in the passport with have a blank space where museums will be able to ‘stamp’ the passports when children visit them. There will also be a blank space next to the challenges that can be stamped.

Museums will be provided with everything they need to participate: blank passports, stamps, stickers, flyers and posters, press release template, briefing note (to be shared will all staff and volunteers), and other supporting information. Alongside this will be a programme of marketing via a project specific website, linked to all partner museum websites. Social media will be utilised and museums will be supported to develop their skills in this area. In 2016 we will also advertising in relevant local publications.Cost
To help support the project, we are asking museums to contribute £50 per site towards the costs. In the 2015 pilot museums received £177 worth of resources and support per site, so this is a good return on your investment!

We can also invoice you in either March or April, depending on which financial year’s budget you would like to use.Project timetable

Recruit museums to the project

The deadline for applications is Friday 11th December 2015

Website copy

There are two deadlines for providing information to be included on the website:

For events in May and June: Friday 22nd April 2016

For events in July and August: Wednesday 8th June 2016

Launch event

Essex: Monday 25th April

Herts and Beds: Wednesday 4th May 2016

Project goes live!

The project will be fully live from Saturday 28th May 2016

Ongoing promotion

Via website, social media, listings publications and websites, and museums’ own distribution lists. Each museum will be given a supply of branded stickers for participating children. Events across the May half term holiday and entire summer holidays will be promoted.

Evaluation

The project will be evaluated by the steering group, which has been expanded from the pilot project to include representation from museums directly. This will take place in September 2016, participating museums will be asked to fill in a short questionnaire and collect minimal data through noting down any anecdotal feedback from your visitors during the project.

Thanks for the great work of the Royal Opera House Bridge we are very familiar with the Arts Award scheme here in Essex. But did you know there is also a scheme which provides qualifications for young people learning in science subjects too?

Last week I talked about the British Science Association’s Science Week. Today, I’m following up by introducing their CREST Scheme.

CREST Star is their scheme for children aged 5 to 12. It has 3 levels:

Star for 5 to 7 year olds

Super Star for 7 to 11 year olds

Mega Star for 8 to 12 year olds

Children participating in Star take part in a series of 1 hour activities. For every activity they complete, they get a sticker to put in their log book (which can be downloaded for free from the website). Once the log book is full they get their certificate.

While the British Science Association have created many activities themselves it is possible to become a CREST partner and have science activities accredited by the scheme. It is possible that sessions you already offer schools, youth groups etc could be accredited in this way.

The CREST Awards are the BSA’s offer for young people aged over 11. There are four levels of award. The first level is Discovery. This bridges the gap between CREST Star and CREST Awards. It can be delivered in 5 hours and is envisioned as “CREST in a day”. This other three levels are based on projects undertaken by the participants:

Bronze – 10 hours of activity

Silver – 30 hours

Gold – 70 hours

Project ideas can come from the young people, teachers/youth leaders or organisations like ours. However, the decision should be student-led, so that they choose a topic they are interested in.

Once the participants have completed their project, their work is assessed and (if successful) they will receive a personalised certificate.

CREST Awards are endorsed by UCAS (the body that oversees applications to universities) and also count towards Duke of Edinburgh Awards and the Children’s University Passport to Learning. As they are an accredited qualification, there is a small per-pupil fee involved to cover assessment costs, details of which can be found here.

As mentioned in my last post, the definition of science is a broad one. Activities could be in many areas that your museum covers such as natural history, archaeology, medicine, forensics, engineering, technology and social sciences.

Many museums are moving away from history and towards science in their offer to schools. This may be a good way of accrediting your offer and making it more attractive to teachers.

Have a think about what you’re already offering it could be but you already have activities that could be parts of the CREST scheme visit the British Science Association website and investigate further.